virus

The Zika virus is responsible for what the World Health Organization calls a global health crisis. The disease is spread by mosquito bites and can cause terrible birth defects like microencephaly when pregnant women are infected. It's also been linked to the development of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare condition that causes the immune system to attack nerves.

Until now it has only been a problem transmitted by mosquitos in South American countries. Now a person in the United States has caught the Zika virus on home turf. The good news is, we're probably not flooded with mosquitos that carry the virus (yet), the bad news is that it was sexually transmitted. According to NBC DFW:

The first person in Dallas County has been infected with the Zika virus without traveling outside the U.S., becoming the first person to acquire the virus in the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The patient was infected through sexual contact, not through a mosquito bite, according to county health officials.

Nature is getty scary, guys, and who better to put that into words than Twitter.

Mollivirus sibericum, which translates to "soft virus from Siberia", is the fourth such 'giant virus' discovered this century. The same team of scientists discovered another of these, Pithovirus sibericum, last year, and Mollivirus sibericum was isolated from the same sample of permafrost.

These prehistoric viruses are called 'giant viruses' because they're visible by light microscopy, with lengths greater than half a micron - a thousandth of a millimetre. As bugs go, they're big.

If the idea that scientists are going to wake this thing up sounds a little disconcerting – and, to be honest, it's not altogether unlike the opening scenes of a plague disaster movie – don't worry. The researchers say they will only revive the virus if they can be certain it's not a threat to animals or humans.

Of course it sounds like the beginning of a movie like Outbreak, but the idea of reintroducing a 30,000-year-old thing back into society also sounds a lot like Encino Man.

The reanimating is meant to be held in the context of our warming Earth. Over time, those frozen Siberian tundras ain't going to be so frozen anymore and the Brendan Frasers of the virus world will reawaken without the help of Pauly Shore scientists.

So, that's terrifying.

But there's still little in the way of explanation as to why these researchers want to reanimate this ancient virus. Either they are just doing it to do it, or they are servants of Cthulhu and this is how they call him to come devour our world.